Last Tales (34 page)

There was an old painter and sculptor who had observed scenery and men in all the countries of Europe, who had once come to Ballegaard to study birds and had there had the brothers and sisters, at the time not yet grown up, presented to him. He looked at them, fell into deep thought and remarked as if to himself: “This pretty litter of Ballegaard in the course of their lives will come to break most of our laws and commandments. But toward one law they will be unfailingly loyal: the law of tragedy. They have, each of them, it written in their hearts.”

One particular little characteristic of the family ought to be mentioned here: they all dreamt vividly and beautifully. The moment they fell asleep in their beds, tremendous landscapes,
vast deep seas, strange animals and people created themselves within their minds. They were too well brought up to entertain strangers with their dreams, but among themselves they would recount and discuss them in detail. The eldest sister, the tallest of the lot and the finest horsewoman, toward the end of her life said to her children: “When I am dead you may write on my tombstone: ‘She saw many hard days. But her nights were glorious.’ ”

But the story-teller does not want to anticipate events. At the time of this particular Copenhagen season no dark fate had yet overtaken any of the young people; only the eldest daughter sat, far away on a big estate of the west country, curiously married to a rich man more than twice her age. The youngest children were still playing at hide-and-seek on the stairs and in the attics of Ballegaard. The second brother, lb, who was by then twenty-three years old, and the second-eldest daughter, Drude, whose twentieth birthday fell on the day of the equinox, were out on the dancing floors of Copenhagen.

Count Hannibal, who would have been pleased to see a big family of his own around him, had been kind to his sister’s children; they were as much at home in his castle as in their own house. Ib, who at the time of his mother’s death was twelve years old, and who had taken his loss much to heart, was brought up with his cousin Leopold. The Countess Louisa at first had looked upon the intimacy with misgiving, for she was the most zealous partisan of pure blood in society. But she was at the same time a passionate mother. When Leopold claimed Ib as a constant companion in his studies and pleasures and Adelaide could not live without Drude, and when she noticed what a becoming contrast Drude’s fair loveliness made to Adelaide’s dark beauty, she gave in, and benevolently adopted her nephew and niece into her own lofty family life. To her friends she talked smilingly of the sister- and brotherhood between the young people; with her children her benevolence toward the
orphelins de mère
often took on a sadder note—to Leopold in particular, who was much like his beautiful mother and devoted to her, she would dwell with melancholy upon the dubious status of the young Angels and the sad outcome of mésalliances in general.

During the season Drude resided, so to say officially, with her old Aunt Nathalie, a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Mariane, in the quarter of Rosenvænget. But Adelaide continually begged and implored her friend to stay overnight at the von Galen mansion, in order that, before a ball, she might get her advice upon her frock and hair ornaments, or have her maid do up Drude’s pale-golden tresses in a new striking manner, and that after the ball, while brushing their hair, the cousins might exchange confidences and laugh together at their admirers and rivals in society. The two girls were generally admitted to be the beauties of the season; the two young men were such close friends that the wits of their circle had given them but one name in common, creating a mythical figure which combined elegance and knowledge of the world with wild, wayward talents. The four young people rode on from crest to crest of the waves of Copenhagen revelry, the observed of all observers, in the happiest of relationships.

But lb was not happy, for he was eating his heart with unrequited love for his cousin Adelaide.

He often wondered how it came to be that, with the dagger in the heart, one might be stabbed anew twenty times a day. How did it come to be, he wondered, that a never-absent picture had in it to make a fresh, overwhelming appearance every hour, dark-eyed, white-toothed, terrible as an army with banners.

She was altogether and hopelessly outside his reach. He did not need the word of society to accept the fact; he had accepted it on his own and from the beginning. He had nothing in him of the iconoclast: the idea of Adelaide in a setting meaner than that into which she was born was revolting,
was nauseating to him; he turned from it, and with even more horror from the idea that such an offense against nature should have been brought about by himself. He had heard Adelaide and her girl friends, in a discussion over their needlework, maintain the theory that the saddest effect of one’s hypothetical marriage to a commoner would be the vanishing of the coronet from one’s handkerchief. He had not contradicted them; in his heart he had agreed with them. The picture of Adelaide, from her dark, flower-adorned hair to her little foot in its silk sandal, must include the coroneted handkerchief at the tip of her slim fingers.

Because to all of his blood, physical and mental nature were one, his longing for her was burning up his young body. His blood was escheated to Adelaide; his limbs and entrails were pledged to her; his eyes, lips, palate and tongue were devoured with the fever of her. Then again his existence held hours of incredible sweetness: she turned her half-closed smiling eyes to him; she let him button her glove, one afternoon, when she had declared that all the world was deadly dull; she had for a moment, yawning, laid her face on his shoulder.

In the end, this last autumn, he had taken a week’s leave and had traveled home to Ballegaard. He had sat with his father, talking about actual, authentic things and matters; he had looked up the people of his childhood who remembered his mother and had learned from them how reluctant they had been to distress or disappoint her. He had walked out to his mother’s grave. Over here, on a stormy and rainy evening, when he had been out in the fields with his old dog, which had been wild with delight to see him, an idea had come to him. He would leave the country to enlist in the army of the French, who seemed to be on the verge of a war with Germany. He had found the plan easier to hold onto than he had expected, and had seen this fact as the first lucky thing that had happened to him for a long time. But
when he applied for permission, his application was turned down.

The Danish Government, in the present situation, had to keep up the strictest neutrality, even in direct opposition to the feeling of the Danish people. The volunteering of a Danish officer for the French Army, at a moment when a Franco-Prussian War seemed inevitable, would be looked upon by the Prussians as a breach of neutrality which might have fatal consequences.

For a whole day a sweet, poisonous temptation dwelt in Ib’s mind: he had done what he could; he might stay at home and see Adelaide as before. But in the evening he cried to it, “Get thee behind me.” He would not have lb Angel turned into a mollusk. And still less would he himself cause the innocent Adelaide to take on the look of a Calypso. Moreover, this resolution of his had been made at Ballegaard. He would now have to resign his commission as a Danish officer; then he would be free to go wherever he liked.

Such a step would mean that he could not, in the future, return to Denmark. It did not much matter; he did not intend to return. So he made his preparations, considering in a strange way both past and future.

In order to fill out this period, he adopted a habit hitherto unknown to him: he began to pay calls and to put in an appearance on the reception days of the ruling ladies of Copenhagen. Only he himself knew that these were visits
pour prendre congé
, paid in a kind of gratitude, or in a kind of remorse, toward his Copenhagen existence. Old hostesses with an eye for a particular brightness in the boy, who till now had heard him described as a wild young person, smiled on his social conversion, and in their minds put him down as a husband for a grandniece out of a big number of sisters. His gay young friends followed his course with jesting comments and believed him to be out to hook an heiress.

On this fashionable pilgrimage of his he became skilled in balancing sword and cap, with white gloves in it, and a teacup, and there had all the looks of a gentle wild animal with big soft paws, patiently and conscientiously going through his series of tricks in a circus. In the salons he occasionally met Adelaide under the chaperonage of her beautiful and imposing mother, and amid the general talk of the groups caught her laughter and her sweet, low, clear conversation voice. It was both happiness and agony; it was, yet, a little more happiness than agony, or he would not have gone on paying visits. In a strange and vague way it did him good to see that other people were now taking in her face and figure as vividly as he himself, and for a short span of time to feel confident that he was not mad. On his way to these social functions she would also from time to time pass him in the street, in her father’s carriage and with Drude by her side, on active service to the mystic rite of leaving cards, an honor shown one noble household by another entirely by means of carriage and pair, coachman and footman, in which the young daughters of the houses took part, so to say invisible and never setting foot outside the carriage. She would smile at him then in a secretive way, might even in such a way blow him a very small quick kiss, stolen too, since she was invisible.

In the reception rooms he watched her surrounded by a throng of admirers, but it did not affect him. In his love for her there was a kind of dignity which rejected jealousy: he knew his passion to be of a different quality to that of any other man.

Toward the end of this season Ib unexpectedly found himself the hero of the day in Copenhagen. One morning after a gay night, he had fought a duel with sabres with the Military Attaché to Sweden and Norway, and blood, if only in modest quantity, had been shed on both sides. Duels were prohibited, and he was sentenced to a week’s barracks arrest. He was not sorry to withdraw from the world for a
while; he was not proud of his exploit, for neither he himself nor Leopold, who had been his second, nor his adversary clearly remembered how the quarrel had arisen. He came out of seclusion to find that Copenhagen society, when unable to get information from the chief actors, had on its own set a series of exciting tales running, and to grin back a little, in a manner to make the tale still more exciting.

A great old lady received on Fridays.

In the square in front of her house a long line of carriages had drawn up; one by one they swung through the gate to turn in the court and swing out again, leaving room for the next in the queue. Spring was in the air today in spite of a sharp little wind running through the streets and chasing bits of paper and straw before it. The sky was a pale blue with light white clouds in it; when the ladies had left the carriages the stolid coachmen themselves sat gazing up at it. The big airy hall of the house was warm; there were oleander trees in pots on the broad stairs leading to the reception rooms, and incense was being burnt—a specialty of the house, the smell of which many years later brought back the idea of Arcadia to the guests now walking up and down. The stair itself today had become a reception room, alive with greetings, and with the rustling of silk frocks and an occasional ring of spurs.

The social functions of the epoch differed from those of later times by the circumstance that here all generations met. Pretty lively-glancing girls steered in like cygnets in the wake of heavier mother swans, and white-haired or bald gentlemen kissed the hands of young married women and cooed to debutantes. Very old ladies, whom the years had rendered small and light as dolls, displayed their wit and charm to timid youths or to ambitious young men who kept in mind the fairy tale in which the hero, when granted one wish, opts for the friendship of all old women. The wide span of age in the assembly made up for its uniformity of class and ideas.

Ib came up the stairs in his cousin Leopold’s company. Out in the square the two young men had been discussing a supper party which Ib’s regiment was giving to a pretty French singer on tour to Copenhagen. But the spring weather had gone to Ib’s heart in a sudden little pang. He saw that the blue shadows of trees on the pavement had changed; their delicate netting was growing fuller as the buds were swelling. In the country, he thought, the coltsfoot by now would be out by the roadside, the fields, light-brown in the light air, were being harrowed, and as one rode along, the cloud of dust behind the harrow, hard and cold and with particles of manure in it, would be blown into one’s eyes and mouth. One might hear the lark. He lost interest in the supper party and became silent.

On the landing the young men for a moment were held back by a mature beauty turning herself before the mirrors, and reflecting, as she shook the fringes of her mantilla into order: “Nay, mirrors are not what they used to be,” then sailing on through the doors.

In the first salon a small group, encircling the wife of the Danish Minister to Paris home on a holiday, discussed the probability of a French-German war. “But can we be quite certain about Italy?” an old court functionary asked the lady. The Ministresse laughed, so to say in French. “My friend,” she exclaimed, “of what are you speaking? Count Nigra is one of the Empress’ most ardent admirers.”

In the inner, red salon the old hostess herself, by the fireside and the samovar, while entertaining an elderly Prince of the Royal House, caught sight of Ib and, unexpectedly, in a little bright twinkle ordered him to her side. Then she held him as hostage, behind a cup of tea, for later use.

In the window recess a number of ladies had gathered round a small gentleman, a painter of European fame. He had once declared all artistic greatness to be only a higher degree of amiability, and the theory might hold good as to his own art, which was inspired by delight in taking in, and
in dealing out, the beauty of the visible world. Since it seemed incongruous that such a brilliant person should have a little pink full-moon face with no hair, features or expression to speak of, and most of all like the posterior of an infant, his pupils, who idolized him, had formed the theory that there had been a shifting about in his anatomy, and that he had got an eminently expressive face in the other place. He was feted in society, but feared as well, because he would at times sit without saying a word, taking in the face and figure of a lady until she felt that she had no clothes on, and at other times, when once set upon a theme, would go on talking forever.